[Reader-list] Worries about war from afar

[pratap pandey]

Dear Shuddha,

Please enjoy yourself. You are a few time zones away
from Delhi, that ffffffff! place. Don't bother about
the fffffffff! place. As traffic red-lights in Delhi
used to put it, RELAX. Tell us about where you are.

You are eloquently concerned about imminent War. I had
hoped you'd be concerned about War-Mongering. That is
to say, the Logic of Fascist Governance.

You are in a place where, once (oops! how can I use
that word? But funnily enough, sitting in a place
where War has never happened, I can!), war happened.
In the ffffffffff! place, War has never happened. The
traders who support this fascist government want this
war to happen. They will profit from it, for God's
sake! How can you tell them to not profit? How else
will they sell their surplus?      

Elsewhere, War rages. Lone has been gunned down. The
media didn't go to the meeting, to find out what it
was that Lone had to say. They swooped down only after
he was shot. (it seems that after the meeting
finished, he was walkingaway, and then a Gunman
appeared, and sprayed bullets.) It SEEMS: It seems
because I don't know! Nobody's TELLING me! I don't
think anybody will tell me. Rajdeep, what are you
doing?

The atmosphere here is very, very cynical. In such an
atmosphere your thoughts, Shuddha, sound sentimental.

"I would like you to be able to say to me, Shuddha,
you are talking nonsense."

Shuddha, you are talking nonsense. So am I. Like you,
I have no control over what this fascist government is
doing. We have absolutely no control. This government
has transformed our thoughts into so much "waffle".
They know we are dis-organised. More importantly, they
know we are just not in touch with the fascisised
proletariat they have managed to create.

There exists today, a "dominant" ideology, and a
"dominant". This "dominant" has been created despite
you and me. This "dominant" has been created not to
spite you and me, but to exist inspite of us. Not in
spite of us. But inspite of us.

Your posting speaks from a position of "unlearning"
the dominant. You have "unlearned" the dominant. Who
else is "unlearned"?

There will be no war. The traders that support the war
will make sure that there will be no war. That is to
say, against Pakistan. About the other wars (you spoke
of them in your May 8, 2002, posting), I am not so
sure.

So enjoy yourself. You are in a place that experienced
war and then managed to create a civil society where,
for the first time in the history of nations, a party
got votes because it had a merely environmental
agenda. Pray, from that place, that War happens here
so that, AT LAST, civil society stops waffling and
starts doing something.

yours unworriedly,
pp   







 --- Shuddhabrata Sengupta <shuddha at www.sarai.net>
wrote: > Dear all at Reader List
> 
> I am sitting right now in a city a few time zones
> away from Delhi, which was 
> once devastated by war. Its factories, its roads and
> its houses were once made 
> into cratered into nothingness by intensive aerial
> attack. Me and some of us 
> from Sarai, inhabitants of this list, are installing
> a work in a far away 
> exhibition replete with images of our city, Delhi,
> the city of Sarais, the city 
> of Sarai. There are cyclists breaking through the
> winter fog on the ISBT 
> bridge, there are the strange bleak landscapes of a
> city that postpones its 
> existence on to a perennial tomorrow. Our work goes
> by a name that recalls the 
> co ordinates of our city – 28.28 N/77.15 E – this is
> how you can find delhi on 
> any map of the world. But a map, whether in a book ,
> or in a bomber aircrafts 
> navigational system is only a set of co ordinates,
> it says nothing about 
> people, about lives, about houses, lived in,
> recently demolished by the 
> municipal authorities or waiting to be bombed and
> flattened into a void. I am 
> worried that the images in our work might be the
> last of a Delhi that is yet to 
> know the reality of what war, and especially what a
> war of the cities is like.
> 
> Perhaps there is in me only the anxiety of great
> distance, an uncanny feeling 
> of foreboding that makes me see and anticipate war
> engulf my city, everytime I 
> switch on the TV in my antiseptic hotel room.
> Perhaps that makes my fears and 
> my worries exaggerated and unrealistic. I would like
> you to be able to say to 
> me, Shuddha, you are talking nonsense. Today I read
> in the website of a 
> newspaper that I read each day in the morning in
> delhi that the Indian 
> government had pulled out the war book. This is the
> set of guidelines that the 
> state works on in a state of war. This is the
> document where the state lays 
> down how to set out blackout procedures, how to put
> black paper on windows, how 
> to hand out gas masks. But imagine the task of
> putting out a million fires. 
> Imagine the horror of a moderately sized nuclear
> weapon just a little more 
> powerful than Hiroshima, frozen suspended over the
> sky of Delhi, or Lahore, 
> hanging in a nanosecond’s interval away from full
> impact. There is a voice in 
> my head that says that there cannot be and will not
> be war, that even the most 
> cussed fascist prime minister, and the worst
> adventurist general will think 
> twice before sending us rushing into this madness,
> that there are American 
> troops on both sides of the international border
> that divides the countries 
> that have amassed a million men on the border in
> full battle preparedness. I 
> hope this is the case. But honestly, for the first
> time in my memory I am 
> really worried. And perhaps my worries are
> compounded by distance. For the 
> first time in my memory Delhi is a city that is
> beginning to have a 
> conversation with itself. Sometimes lackluster,
> sometimes heated, sometimes 
> tepid, but we are talking, and we have things to
> think about in a way I don’t 
> recall us having had in a long time. And I really
> worried that this tiny space 
> in the imagination that we have laid claim to might
> disappear in a way that 
> none of us are prepared to face the consequences of.
> 
> I am hoping that someday soon this list, the city it
> animates (dimly) and all 
> of us can step back and say that all this talk of
> war between India and 
> Pakistan was just alarmist nonsense, and that we can
> get on with life and talk 
> about other things, other places, other times.
> Noticing, for instance, how 
> brightly the glare of war has cast the killings in
> Gujarat into a dark shadow 
> of amnesia. If war happens, the only thing that I
> hope we will learn is, not to 
> forget so easily.
> 
> -- 
> Shuddhabrata Sengupta
> SARAI:The New Media Initiative
> Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
> 29 Rajpur Road
> Delhi 110 054
> India
> Phone : (00 91 11) 3960040
> 
> 
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